Podesta Emails: Obama Claimed Executive Privilege To Avoid Disclosing Emails Between Himself and Hillary to Congress

In a March 4, 2015 email to Hillary Clinton's lawyer Cheryl Mills, Clinton's eventual campaign chairman John Podesta asks if they should withhold email exchanges between Clinton and President Obama that were sent over Clinton's private server.

The day before Podesta sent his email to Mills, the House Benghazi Committee privately told Clinton to preserve and hand over all her emails. (The FBI report on Clinton's emails notes on Page 18 that on March 3, 2015, the United States House Select Committee on Benghazi provided a letter to the law firm Williams & Connolly requesting the preservation and production of all documents and media related to the email addresses hdr22@clintonemail.com and hrcl7@clintonemail.com.)

The email from Podesta to Mills, titled "Special Category," reads: "Think we should hold emails to and from potus? That's the heart of his exec privilege. We could get them to ask for that. They may not care, but I(t) seems like they will."

Mills did not respond by email. The Clinton-Obama emails were turned over to the State Department, which later announced it would not release them.

There's a special poetry in that the people who shriek the loudest about "privilege" actually have the very most of it and are the most eager to use it for their own ends.